It's back to Titan for this month's CHARM: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/video/products/...aProductsCharm/

Very, very cool! ( )

So presumably the amino acids are initially held up in a nitrile (loose) or amidine (incorporated) structure in the original tholin?

Please feel free to expand on that Mike. Very few of us here are organic chemists. Myself, I'm ignorant, but not hopelessly so.

Here a graphic that shows structures of amines, imines, nitriles, and amidines:

Click to view attachment

A good article on the analysis of Titan tholins is: Somorgyi et al. Journal of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry 16 (2005)50-859. "Organic Environments on Saturn's Moon, Titan: Simulating Chemical reactions and Analyzing Products by FT-ICR and Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometry". doi: 10.1016/j.jasms.2005.01.027

Freely available here.

In the article, the authors provide evidence that tholin contains "amino, imine, and nitrile functionalities". Presumably some of these components hydrolyze with water to furnish the amino acids described in the CHARM presentation.

CH4/N2 + "spark" --> tholin [CxHyNz polymeric mixture with amine, nitrile, imine functional groups] ---(+H2O)--> some amino acids (Asp, Asn, Glu, Gln)

That's helpful, thanks Mike.